I have The Last Cut on my TBR and I am really looking forward to reading it! I am also thrilled to be hosting a stop on the blog tour today and have a fabulous Author Guest Post from Danielle Ramsay! But before we see what treasure lies in store, lets find out a bit about the author and this book!
About The Author
Danielle Ramsay is a proud Scot living in a small seaside town in the North-East of England. Always a storyteller, it was only after initially following an academic career lecturing in literature that she found her place in life and began to write creatively full-time. After much hard graft her work was short-listed for the CWA Debut Dagger in 2009. Always on the go, always passionate in what she is doing, Danielle fills her days with horse-riding, running and murder by proxy.
About The Book
Obsessions can kill.
First, he selects them. Strips them of their identity.
Then he kills them. All for her…
DS Harri Jacobs transferred to Newcastle from the Met in the hope of leaving her past behind: the moment where her stalker turned violent. He left her alive, saying that one day he would be back. And she ran.
But a year later, she realises he has followed her from home. He’ll prove his devotion. With blood…
Like many other writers, I loved to read and write; everything and anything. At fourteen, a short story I had written was entered into a national writing competition by my school. It was about a Vietnam Veteran returning home to face abject social alienation and consequently, suicide. I was a Scottish teenage girl, but I realised that did not mean that I could not transcend gender, nationality, race or age; storytelling gave me the means to cross over.
Perhaps it was because I had grown up in Dundee with a black-skinned mother (I am white-skinned) whose father had been born in 1903 and raised in Dundee by a white family paid to care for him. His Algerian father had come to the UK to study and had then travelled internationally as a musician and his mother had left him when born to return to Africa. He grew up as one of two black men in Dundee at the time. At the age of thirty-seven he was deployed at the outbreak of the Second World War to France. Physically, as a 6’1’ black man he was a conspicuous figure; finally captured, he proceeded to escape three times during his five year imprisonment. Known as the “brother” he would care for fatally injured soldiers. He even survived a “death march” into Germany at the close of the war by feigning death and then made his own way home through Europe, arriving months after the end of the war. Ironically, he died shortly after being reunited with my grandmother from an intracranial tumour believed to have been the result of trauma to his head from being beaten repeatedly by the butt of a German soldier’s rifle.
Perhaps this legacy was what had made me want to become a writer: I would sit with my grandmother and stare at his photograph and imagine him and his life – his story. Then I would imagine my grandmother, and her story as a white woman facing indiscriminate racism for marrying a black man and having his children: one white-skinned child (my aunt) whose birth speculated racist rumours of infidelity and five black-skinned children (my mother and her brothers).
However, I put my ambition to be a writer on hold when I went into academia to study script-writing, then race and gender. After spending a year in America, I studied African American studies and was placed on a reserve list for a fully funded post-doctoral fellowship to Harvard to work under the doyen of African American studies, Henry Louis Gates Jr. Scandalously, I did not submit my PhD and consequently, did not go to Harvard. Instead, I decided to write creatively and wrote five DI Jack Brady crime novels; the most recent being The Puppet Maker (2016).
But it is my new book, The Last Cut which features DS Harri Jacobs – a female cop who finds herself tracking down a serial killer who is altering his victims to look like her – where my personal and academic history have finally come together in the form of a psychological thriller. Harri’s namesakes are three inspirational female writers who used their work to battle against racial and gender oppression: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) and Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Harri’s namesakes fought on, regardless; each with their own life struggles be it slavery, poverty or gender inequality – or all three. They won, each one of them in their own rights. No one saved them and like my grandfather, they ultimately saved themselves.
WOW! Thank you so much, Danielle for this AMAZING post! For a copy of The Last Cut, a quick click on the wee book below will get you to amazon super fast! ?
